We have been making fine press and artist's books for over 30 years. When we started, as craftspeople at Renaissance Faires, we fell in love with the "gypsy wagons" that other vendors had built to sleep in or to sell their wares from. We built this wagon in 2009, designed after a typical 1900s Redding style English Gypsy Wagon. We are now traveling around the country to sell our books, teach book arts workshops, talk about books as artworks and to seek out beauty in the USA.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Waltz across Ohio with wood engraving on my mind..

We last wrote from Cleveland, then we went from Pittsburg to Athens to
Cincinnati to Monterey, Kentucky. Sometimes, as we zigzagged across Ohio last
week, we felt a bit like a band whose booking agent did not pay much attention
to the map. But we don’t have a booking agent, so there was no one to blame but
ourselves. We probably got the most beautiful fall photo of our gypsy wagon camping between Pittsburg and Athens:

In Athens we gave a lecture to the book arts class at the university, gave a open gypsy wagon show and tell to a local home school group at the
public library, and visited the community based paper mill called Paper Circle.

The hunt for painted tin to use in a class at John C Campbell Folk School led us to this rural scrap metal yard. We both scrounged around the pile and picked up a bunch.

Waltzing across Ohio we visited the Serpent Mound and the
Appalachian Highlands Nature Preserve. “The most singular sensation of awe and
admiration overwhelmed me…for here before me was the mysterious work of an
unknown people…I mused on the probabilities of the past; and there seemed to
come to me a picture as of a distant time…” F. W. Putham at the Serpent Mound
in 1883.

Peter in a cave at Highlands Nature Preserve, Ohio

an old drawing of the Serpent Mound

Donna meditating at the head of the serpent, Serpent Mound, Ohio

In Monterey, Kentucky, we took a wood engraving class from Wesley Bates
at Gray Zeitz’s Larkspur Press. Wood engraving is similar to the linoleum
cutting that Donna has done to make illustrations for many of our books, but it
works the endgrain, and can achieve variations of shading, line and light in a
manner impossible to achieve in a linoleum cut. Donna’s future work will
reflect some of the new skills she gained in this workshop.

Donna's engraving for upcoming book, "Sierra High Route"

Finally, walking to the library at UK I watched lines of
students leaving their classes staring at their phones, typing madly, and I
mused on how society was changing so rapidly. Soon after, ironically, I was
sitting at a lunchtime concert by a folksinger, Si Kahn, scanning his web site on my iphone
(learning about his current protests against privatization) rather than
listening carefully to what he was singing. Oh well …